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The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism

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Edward Feser's The Last Superstition is a polemical work. However, this should not be surprising for two reasons. First, Feser is dealing with amounts to not mere nonsense, but nonsense on stilts. Second, Feser once wrote an essay entitled, Can Philosophy be Polemical?, pondering whether it is appropriate to engage in polemical debate over philosophical questions. In this book, Feser answers that question in the affirmative. He freely admits in the preface, "If this seems to be an angry book, that is because it is." (TLS, x) Feser regards the creed of the New Atheists as dangerous both personally and socially, and his response is écrasez l'infâme.

The Last Superstition is the book I had been wanting, not because it is a tract against the New Atheism, but because it summarizes the best arguments for an Aristotelian-Thomist metaphysics in the face of modern objections. This metaphysics is presented as it developed historically, beginning with the pre-Socratics, on through Plato and Aristotle, to its full flowering among the Scholastics. Feser covers change, actuality and potency, form and matter, the four causes, arguments for the existence of God, and the rational foundations of morality.

By succinctly providing this history, Feser is providing a service to all those who have forgotten, or never truly knew what are the main features of an Aristotelian philosophy. For Feser's most damning criticism of Richard Dawkins et al. is that they have simply not bothered to do their homework. By not collecting the relevant data, they have sinned against the spirit of the science in whose name they crusade. To publish a scientific paper without any evidence would be scandalous, but is precisely the case that Feser makes against them. None of the New Atheists demonstrates any familiarity with the actual arguments of historical theist philosophers except for Rev. William Paley, who functions as a convenient whipping boy.

By way of example, Feser quotes the admission of philosopher Anthony Flew in 2004 that he now believes in the existence of God despite a lifetime of argument to the contrary. Flew admitted that he had never actually considered the Aristotelian arguments for the existence of God, and was forced to admit their cogency upon doing so. Those whom Feser targets in The Last Superstition have not yet bothered to consult the texts. Feser documents this amply through quotations from the New Atheists' works.

The weakest part of Feser's argument is in the section on natural law. The difficulty is not that the best contemporary formulation is not presented. The difficulty is that contemporary natural law arguments use human, homo sapiens, and person univocally. These are not just different things, they are different kinds of things. To use the Scholastic terminology, each belongs to a different genus. However, this failure leaves Feser's main argument untouched, because Aristotle and Aquinas were alike able to discern rational foundations for morality without the benefit of a modern doctrine of natural rights that makes use of equivocal terms.

Feser's references are very good, providing further information for the many points which could be elaborated upon. Covering as much ground as this book does would be impossible without considering a great many complicated and subtle topics briefly. However, this is not to say that Feser does not adequately address his topic. He makes short work of the New Atheists due to the poverty of their arguments, and then briefly presents arguments that modernity is more comprehensible if one considers modern problems in light of broadly Aristotelian philosophy. In particular, many of the perennial questions of modern philosophy, such as the mind-body problem or the validity of inductive reasoning become explainable with Aristotle's more robust account of causation. Feser's task is made easier here by the latent Aristotelianism lurking in every corner of Western Civilization. We do not notice our debt to Aristotle for the same reason that fish do not feel wet.

Edward Feser's The Last Superstition is a worthy introduction to the realist philosophical tradition, and is enlivened by Feser's sharp wit. Good for anyone who would like to know more about Aristotelian philosophy.

This book is a must have for anyone interested in the debate with the new atheists, or anyone interested in the value of classical philosophy.

Ed Fesser has written a book that can be taken as a great overview of Greek philosophy and the insights of Aquinas and the Scholastics. He shows the incoherence of the "materialist-mechanistic" view which seeks to banish the existence of non-material entities such as mind and soul. He writes in a down to earth manner, always defining his terms and giving examples that are accesible to laymen interested in the subject. He brilliantly defends Aristotelian thought, showing that it is relevant and true even in the present day. He shows how the "new atheists" have misrepresented Aquinas and set up strawmen to attack.

If you want to be able to defend religion and traditional morality, the arguments that Feser presents are a Godsend. As he makes clear, there is no appeal to "faith", his entire argument is based on reason and rational inferences. I cannot praise this book too much. Read it and you will see for yourself.

When you're going to read a book, it's a good idea to know more or less what it refers to.

Dr.Edward Feser's book The Last Superstition argues for the contemporary relevance of Aristotelian Thomistic philosophy and the worldview entailed by it. The philosophical case for it, if proved sound, would implies that atheism, materialism, naturalism, secular humanism, moral relativism, conceptualism, and other philosophical positions, doctrines, ideas or systems (and their social expressions) are absolute non-starters.

The book is NOT a detailed critical review of new atheists' specific arguments (even though Dr.Feser incidently uses somes specific ideas of new atheists like Dawkins or Hitchens to illustrate some of his points), but a positive, rigorous, philosophically brillant and erudite case for the contemporary relevance of an Aristotelian Thomistic worldview, and how the modern "overcome" of it (based mainly on misrepresentations, caricatures and, according Dr.Feser, in a philosophical agenda) has caused many philosophical, cultural and social problems.

Given I judge a book by its contents, and not by its title (or subtitle), I give the book 5 stars due its philosophical rigour, originality and clarity of exposition. Also, I do believe this book offers a good philosophical and rational case for the existence of God and, therefore, the falsity of atheism (including, but not limited to the new atheism). In this sense, the book is an important philosophical contribution for the current debate about God's existence.

I strongly recommend this book for atheists, agnostics and theists interested in philsophical questions regarding God and worldviews in general. Also, readers interested in a good introduction to Aristtoelian Thomistic philosophy will have in this book a superb exposition of its main ideas.

You may find yourself changing your thoughts and beliefs after reading it... and, above all, looking from a new philosophical glasses the relevance and brilliance of some of the philosophical ideas of great men like Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas.

However, if you're looking for a philosophical book that specifically, directly and convincingly rebuts and refute all the main SPECIFIC arguments of the New Atheists, this book will probably dissapoint you. Instead of this book, I'd strongly recommend you "A Sceptic's Guide to Atheism" by philosopher Peter Williams, a book that you can order from damaris website (http://www.damaris.org/cm/shop/product/60/). Williams' book is probably the best SPECIFIC and DETAILED philosophical response in print to each of the New Atheists (Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens, Harris, Grayling, etc.).

I am an atheist/agnostic, and "The Last Superstition" is the apologetics book I have recommended to several evangelical friends and relatives. Although I have several problems with Edward Feser's claims in the book, this book is far superior to those by Lee Strobel, Josh McDowell, and any other book I've ever read that attempts to prove the existence of God. Edward Feser is a Roman Catholic scholar who is an expert on classical and medieval philosophy, and his point of view is a breath of fresh air when compared to fundamentalist defenses of the faith.

Feser's central argument is the Cosmological Argument (First Cause or Uncaused Cause or Unmoved Mover). For years the Cosmological Argument has been put forth by believers as the ultimate defense for the existence of God, and just as often nonbelievers have found it all too easy to discredit. Part of the problem is that both the believers and the nonbelievers (especially nonbelievers who are biologists with little understanding of philosophy) all have a weak grasp of the concept and are only aware of simplified versions of the Cosmological Argument. Fortunately Feser does not make this mistake. Feser starts with Plato's Theory of Forms. He then shows how Aristotle modified Plato's theory and came up with his version of the Cosmological Argument. Feser then traces the evolution of these ideas through Augustine and later Thomas Aquinas.

Feser's starting point is a bit questionable. I tend to think that there are major problems with Plato's Theory of Forms, but I am too ignorant of philosophy to be able to explain why I believe it is wrong. But from that foundation and appropriate modifications of those ideas over time, Feser puts together a very solid argument about how Greek philosophers and Catholic theologians anticipated the arguments against their proofs of God, but the arguments still stand.

Feser's book is definitely a polemic, and this is the aspect of the book I have the biggest problem with. He spews forth flaming insults against the New Atheists just as much as they have insulted believers. And I take great issue with Feser's strong anti-homosexual bias. This is in no way an attempt to be a level-headed scholarly book.

However it is the scholarly elements that make the book worth reading. Believers and nonbelievers alike will benefit from the philosophy lessons Feser gives us. This book provides an education of classical and medieval philosophy that I have never found in such a neat, readable little package - assuming that all of Feser's homophobia and gay bashing don't make you vomit all over the book first. I don't expect this book to change my mind regarding the existence or non-existence of a deity, but it is nice to see a thoughtful, educated, philosophical argument for God for a change rather than the garbage that we have been exposed to. At the very least it's a good book on the history of philosophy.

I have ready everything by Feser so far, most notably his books on Nozick and Locke and his introduction to the Philosophy of Mind and was mightly impressed by those, so I had a high degree of expectation coming to this work. And I certainly wasn't disappointed!

Feser has done a superb job taking down not just the case for atheism itself but also the metaphysical presuppositions that were bequeathed to us from Descarte and Hume that have conferred on the atheist far more credibility than is warranted (and not to mention countless other isms).

Descartes and Hume have done enormous damage to western systems of thought by their articulation of a mechanistic/non-teleological nature. This can be seen in the repeated failures of modern philosophers to integrate the mind (specifically qualia and intentionality) and morality back into the modern mechanistic natural story. It also resulted in a premature banishment of any evidence for God's work/immanence in natural causation. Another nasty concequent is that it has believers arguing for God in a distant and inductive way from a mechanistic universe. After reading a work like this it makes sense to me that many in the science world have been reluctant to accept Intelligent Design (not to mention the woefully discredited and unbiblical young earth hypothesis).

In contradistinction Feser makes a case for the Aristotelean-Thomistic metaphysical system that brings concepts such as teleology and final cause back into the scientific causal processes itself and gives God's hand in nature more credibility than it otherwise would have.

I also found fascinating his foray into some of the new movements in metaphysics and the philosophy of science from the likes of Nancy Cartwright and Brian Ellis who have been advocating something broadly similar to the non-Humean, A-T metaphysics.

In all a terrific book that, whilst not a detailed refutation of atheism, still needs to be engaged by any believer who wants to understand the current atheist/theist debates at a deeper philosophical level.

The first Atheist I engaged in argument was when I was an eighteen-year old Marine fresh out of Boot Camp. His most notable quality was the same I have found in most of the Atheists I have met in the thirty years since, smugness. While Boot Camp had prepared me for physical battle, I was ill equipped to wage a sustainable campaign against the arguments he used. I knew I was being had, I just didn't know how.

The weapons needed to engage in this particular type of battle are a grounding in classical philosophy (principally logic and metaphysics), the fundamentals of the scientific method, and a short history of modern philosophy. I consider "The Last Superstition" to be a Boot Camp for the brain. It is an intense, sometimes painful, training session from which you will emerge a more coherent thinker. It will not only equip you to engage the "New Atheist" but muddle headed thinking in general.

Some reviews have complained about several of Professor Feser's conclusions, especially those that deal with the moral realm, but like the thinkers of the past who rejected Aristotle's metaphysics, they reject rather than refute. One might as well complain that 2+2=4. Truth is not subject to our preferences.

The book is written in a style that directly engages the reader. Professor Feser is able to present abstract concepts in a manner that the uninitiated can grasp. This is not an easy read, but nothing truly worthwhile ever is and this is a truly worthwhile book to read.

The Last Superstition offers an answer to modern atheism (which might more properly be called "anti-theism".) That answer is a return to the metaphysics of Aristotle as developed by Aquinas. But wasn't all of that refuted? No, it was NEVER refuted, only abandoned. But wasn't it made obsolete by newer developments? No, those "developments" involved, and still involve, attempts to find answers that don't depend on Aristotle's methods. Why then were the foundations of Aristotle and Aquinas abandoned after two thousand years of development and refinement? Because they were, and are, difficult. Because they are so thoroughly worked out that it is hard to do "original work." And mostly because they have implications that are inconvenient.

Finding a simpler and easier way to the truth would be a good thing, just as being able to replace differential equations with simple algebra is a good thing when it can be done. But so far the attempts at simplification have largely failed. They get different results, and either they must be false or Aristotle and Aquinas are false and at most one of the Moderns is true. Given the rigor in both Aristotle and Aquinas, I'm inclined to bet on them.

Feser takes some very difficult ideas and sketches them out in a way that will be accessible to most people. But the sketches are necessarily incomplete in many cases. This book will not convince people who are hostile to the ideas unless they are unsparingly honest. And too often he voices his frustration and disgust with the Moderns and the directions they take, and the direction that modern society is taking.

Faults notwithstanding, The Last Superstition explains the split between the Old Philosphy and the New, and makes a strong case that the Old is right after all. And if it is, all of the arguments of the modern anti-theists are wasted on strawmen. The real arguments have not been and cannot be refuted by their ideas, which do not even rise to the dignity of error.

This is one of the best books I have ever read. Edward Feser does a marvelous job of refuting the New Atheists. Take note, this is a very polemical work and Feser is not afraid to call a spade a spade (or with Dawkins, call a blowhard a blowhard). Feser starts out by explaining the philosophies of Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas. This section of the book is incredibly abstract but so, so worth it if you can stick with the material and make sure you grasp the arguments. I will admit, understanding Aristotle's four causes and the way Aquinas applies them to things like the world, the immortality of the soul, God, etc. has completely transformed the way I think about the world. Next, Feser demonstrates how this Aristotelian view of the world leads right into Natural Law and how anything against Natural Law is essentially absurd and perverse. Finally, Feser demonstrates how the Modern Philosopher's idea of a a Mechanistic Universe is utterly absurd when trying to explain things like the mind. He completely (in my opinion) eviscerates Cartesian Dualism and the Materialistic view of the world and shows how they are supreme acts of "muddleheadness" (Feser's word, not mine). I would say that if you are not convinced by the arguments presented in the book then you simply do not understand the arguments themselves. This, Feser explains, is exactly the problem with the New Atheists. Feser has read their works and he demonstrates, with the New Atheists' own books, that these guys have been making caricatures of Aristotle and Aquinas' arguments and not actually addressing them proper. Feser also demonstrates that the New Atheists' favorite whipping boy, William Paley, was actually influenced by the modern philosophers and thus accepted the Mechanistic view of the world. Feser argues that this is why Paley's arguments are so often refuted. The problem Feser sees is that abandoning the Aristotelian conception of the world and the Aristotelian four causes, and replacing this view with the Mechanistic conception of the world and the Mechanistic conception of cause and effect is what has created the problems we have today (i.e. trying to explain the mind/body problem, reducing everything to materialism, etc.) Do yourself a favor, buy this book, wrestle with its ideas, understand what Feser is saying, and have your life transformed.

There isn't much I can add to the positive reviews of this book. I found it very easy to understand. Feser does an excellent job of explaining philosophical ideas without resorting to lots of technical language. I think he does a good job of explaining Thomism and defending it against both past and present critics. The work is polemical but, given that it is a response to the New Atheists, I find it understandable. If you are put off by polemics, I'd recommend his book, "Aquinas." Otherwise, I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in learning more about Aquinas's philosophy.

THE LAST SUPERSTITION - A Refutation of the New Atheism

This is perhaps the most satisfying book I have ever read, because, positively, it deals with and establishes the truth of the three most fundamental issues that can possibly exist [the author repeats these three over and over throughout his book, e.g. on p. 25: `the existence of God, the immortality of the soul, and the natural law conception of morality'], and because it also demolishes the opposite view, delivering the promise made in the subtitle: "A Refutation of the New Atheism" which is propounded especialy by the 'New Atheists' Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris and Dennett. In other words, to use the words of a very ancient popular song, it "accentuates [in fact it establishes] the positive, and it eliminates the negative".

I make the point, though, that even at the risk of overloading the title or subtitle, the author could [or should] have included in it/them some indication that his purpose was twofold, first to establish the truth and the continuing validity of the traditional metaphysical and religious worldview established in the Judeo-Greco-Christian tradition, and secondly to refute the worldview of 'modern' mainstream European and US philosophy [Descartes, Hume, Hobbes, Locke, Kant, Darwin, Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, Hitchens, et al.] which threatened and partly took over from the previous worldview. This latter, naturalist, secular, anti-spiritual worldview is "a counter-religion , a counter-morality" [Feser's 'Last Superstition'], "that is ... deeply irrational and immoral, indeed the very negation of reason and morality" (p. 20).

I would like to stress that Feser establishes his second thesis, namely, the wrongness and the evil of the modern secular/naturalist worldview, by examining it in itself and in its results, and finding it wanting - and not merely by stating that it must be wrong and evil because it contradicts the `right, correct and good' Aristotelico-Thomist worldview of his especial heroes. These heroes are the pagan Greek philosopher Aristotle (4th century BC), and Aristotle's principal follower and commentator, St Thomas Aquinas (12th century AD, known in the literature equally as Thomas or just Aquinas, the chief `Scholastic' philosopher/theologian of the vibrant scholarship - `Scholasticism' - of medieval European Roman Catholicism).

Feser constantly invokes the metaphysics of Aristotle, as explicated by Aquinas, in the defence of the logical correctness and compelling force of the arguments/proofs from reason (apart from `special revelation') for his three main points: the existence of God, the immortality of the spiritual human soul, and the moral law. His point, made over and over, is that the metaphysics of the `modern worldview' in turn leads of necessity to the intrinsically wrong and evil, irrational, immoral, and even, for him, `insane' worldview of the `New Atheists'. Feser says on page 51 (he puts the whole sentence in italics): "Abandoning Aristotelianism, as the founders of modern philosophy did, was the single greatest mistake ever made in the entire history of Western thought".

Every page of the book contains one, or usually several, quotable analyses and summation statements by Feser. But although his book deals with the most fundamental metaphysics, I found it to be unusually comprehensible, for the genre. Nevertheless this is not an easy read.

Feser centres his argument for the three great issues on an analysis of the `four causes' for everything that exists, where the existence of that `thing' is contingent, caused, and not, as for God, the same as its essence. These causes were proposed by Aristotle and developed by Aquinas: 1) the MATERIAL cause; out of which something is made: e.g. a rubber ball is made out of rubber; 2 the FORMAL cause, or nature of the object: e.g. its `rubberyness': the rubber ball is a rubber ball, not a leopard or a housefly; 3) the EFFICIENT cause: who or what made the object: a given factory made the ball, Michelangelo carved his David, and so on; and (4), the FINAL cause, what a `thing' exists for. Feser's brief analysis of the final cause on page 70 merits quoting at some length: "Aquinas refers to the final cause as `the cause of causes' and for good reason. The material cause of a thing underlies its potential for change; but potentialities ... are always potentialities FOR, or directed TOWARD , some actuality. Hence final causality underlies all potentiality and thus all material cause. The final cause of a thing is also the central aspect of its formal cause; indeed, it determines its formal cause. For it is only because a thing has a certain end or final cause that it has the form it has ....And ... efficient causality cannot be made sense of apart from final causality. Indeed NOTHING makes sense - not the world as a whole, nor morality or human action in general, not the thoughts you're thinking or the words you're using, not ANYTHING AT ALL - without final causes. They are certainly utterly central to, and ineliminable from our conception of ourselves as rational and freely choosing agents, whose thoughts and actions are always directed toward an end beyond themselves" (emphases in Feser's text).

Hume and his followers, notably the four `new atheists', destroy reality and reason, for Feser, because they eliminate formal cause and final cause. They eliminate the idea of a `nature' or `form' for any reality, and eliminate all causality and purpose. They admit only a material `cause' and an efficient `cause'. I summarize by quoting from Antony Flew's 2007 book `There is a God `: "I have long wanted to make major corrections to my book [an acclaimed commentary on Hume's Philosophy of Belief published by Flew in 1961]... in the light of my new-found awareness that Hume was utterly wrong to maintain that we have no experience, and hence no genuine ideas, of making things happen and of preventing things from happening, of physical necessity and of physical impossibility (p. 57)." Flew concludes with the delightful verdict, which I consider totally supports Feser: "Hume's scepticism about cause and effect and his agnosticism about the external world are of course jettisoned the moment he leaves his study (p. 58)." Feser demolishes and demolishes and demolishes Hume's `non-causality' throughout his book.

Feser argues that the modern philosophy of the past three centuries, if lived out in practice (not merely fantasized about in Hume's study) would have made impossible the very science which it claims has destroyed the need for a God and any purpose in the universe and any reality for rational mankind. Science, and mankind, need `form' and purpose, finality - or else there can be no science and no rational mankind.

I will conclude this all-too-sketchy review by adding Stephen Hawking to the rogues gallery of Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris and Dennett whom Feser ridicules. May I refer the reader to my review (published on amazon on 23 Sept 2010) of the absurd book `The Grand Design - New Answers to the Ultimate Questions of Life' published by Hawking in 2010. Basically, Hawking's book is cosmology, with occasional forays into the world of `the ultimate questions of life', where he flounders abjectly. Having told us on page 5 that `philosophy is dead', Hawking then nevertheless proceeds to give us the strictly metaphysical conclusions that the universe created itself out of nothing, and, furthermore, that it thus created itself according to necessary laws of nature (though nature did not yet exist pre-Big Bang!), that human beings have no free will, and (in the very last paragraph of the book, p. 181) that "we human beings ... are ourselves mere collections of fundamental particles of nature". Hawking claims that his book will tell us "Why is there something rather than nothing? Why do we exist? Why this particular set of laws and not some other? " (p. 171). His (purely cosmological) answers to these questions must be simply laughed out of court. It is laughable already that Hawking's book, aimed at eliminating design from the world around us, is called 'The Grand Design'.

Feser's book should be the subject of a compulsory introductory course for every philosophy undergraduate.